January WIPocalypse Introduction

Hi and welcome to a new year of WIPocalypse! As Measi has pointed out, this will be the 13th year of this SAL (although I haven't been around since the beginning - but it is still the 11th year for me!) and we are all choosing to see this as a lucky number. To lots of productive stitching days in the year ahead!

This first SAL post of the year is meant to introduce us, our projects and out stitching plans for the year. I already jumped the gun on the latter, by putting up my WIPGO post a couple days ago, but I think I can still find some things to talk about without repeating myself!

So, intro first. Hi, I'm Leonore, 34 years old and from the beautiful town of Freiburg in Southern Germany. I've been crafting in some way or form since my grandma taught me how to crochet 30-ish years ago, and been blogging about it for 10. Which in fact reminds me that I totally missed my big bloggoversary in December, dang! So that's probably another thing you should know, despite sometimes appearing so, I am really not all that organized or good with dates. I'm trying, though! 
By day, I'm a software developer, have been married for 5 years, and my husband and I are taking care of my 91 year old grandma, who is often the recipient of my crafting. Gotta spoil her while I still can!

For my projects, there are way too many - I've been working on bringing the number down, and reduced it from 50 to 42 over the course of 2023, but I'm not going to introduce them all in this place. Instead, I will be talking about three that have a special place for this SAL, and the others will just pop up as they do. In fact, these are the same three projects that I was talking about in this same spot last year, and in my 2023 WIPocalypse outro...so I guess there will be a bit of repeating myself after all.

First and foremost, there is The Loneliness of Autumn, which I have been SALing with my friend Rachel for the last couple ears. I recently switched from stitching by colour to filling in pages, and just hit 80% done in December. Throughout the year, I am aiming to continue stitching on this at a rate of 1 length of thread a day, and maybe, just maybe, we might see this finished by year's end.

My other focus project for the year is Guardian of Wayfarers by PatternNadGavr. It is heavily featured in my WIPGO goals for the year as I will attempt to work 10 hours on this every month. At the end of 2023 I was at 49% done so I am really hoping to get it done by December!

In 2023, I wanted to get my oldest WIP done, which was a tablecloth kit without a name, dubbed 'Meadow Tablecloth'. I worked on it for most of the focus challenge months, hoping to finish it, but ran out of steam in the end. So it's back on the plate for this year - hopefully I will finish it during the first focus challenge in March, or even before then if I'm being really good.

I'm not completely sure yet what I will pick to replace it, but I will let you know for sure! 

So that's me and (some of) my projects. Thank you for joining me on this journey for another year, and now, let's get stitching!